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A traditional advertising stand or a digital A-board?

The customer’s experience of the store is created even before entering the store. It is influenced, for example, by the store’s location, facade, display window, product display, cleanliness and of course the products and offers visible outside. Some of these things can be influenced more than others.

When talking about the active marketing of the store in the vicinity of the store, the first thing that comes to mind is a traditional, A-shaped advertising stand standing on its own. A printed or handwritten poster tells one specific marketing message in capital letters: offer, novelty, sale or something else. Such a traditional advertising stand is a simple, reliable and inexpensive medium, as long as up-to-date advertising material is ready or the company has staff with copywriting skills. The stand, which is made of a thin metal tube, is also easy to set up and move, and it is not very susceptible to weather changes either, so you can leave it in the sun or at the mercy of the frost without any worries. All in all, quite a competent shot.

Room for improvement in attention value

The list of what an advertising stand on the street or in the corridor of a shopping center cannot do is longer. Perhaps the most important thing is that a static advertising poster is ultimately not very effective in attracting the attention of passers-by, unless their eyes happen to fall on it – or they stumble upon the stand itself.

During the day, a person sees thousands of marketing messages that can be counted as advertising, so the competition for customers’ attention is fierce. A motionless poster below the eye level of a person walking by is not directly an attention magnet, unless the ad’s message, for example about half-price ice fishing overalls, falls specifically into the sensory perception field of a person looking for new ice fishing overalls.

Collapsible does not bend to everything

Another minus for the traditional stand and poster comes from the fact that you cannot react very quickly to unexpectedly changed situations or suddenly appearing sales opportunities – at least with brand-appropriate communication. If, for example, the advertised promotional product runs out the only alternative is to hide the entire stand or quickly craft a new, updated advertising poster. This of course takes staff time away from actual sales work.

The traditional sales stand, which communicates with advertising posters, is therefore cheap, portable and simple but not a very effective or adaptable advertising tool. However the basic idea is fine. We try to get the customer interested even outside the store and turn them from passers-by into customers.

The digital A-board – a challenger from the future

There are many things in retail stores that you would like to tell passers-by who seem to flow past the store. Presenting the best products doesn’t help if people don’t succumb to their attraction. Attracting a crowd to shop with just one marketing message is like catching a school of fish with a worm hook. You can get closer to the trawler with the digital A-board, which is a modern and significantly improved version of the familiar advertising stand. Outwardly, it resembles a traditional advertising stand, meaning it stands on its own legs, is modeled after the letter A and displays advertisements. The biggest difference, however, is that the legs do not support the poster, but a luminous, digital display. It therefore falls into the digital signage category, which includes, among other things, advertising and information screens and electronic shelf labels. Instead of one advertising message, the digital A-board can present several different contents; images, texts and above all videos. A moving image is like candy to our senses that doesn’t go unnoticed.

 

A moving image is a sales booster without an equal

Movement draws a person’s attention, and we can’t even do anything about it, because it’s already built into our genes. The fact that our senses are sensitive to movement and changes in the environment is a product of evolution. Those individuals survived that detected the approach of predators and accordingly located the prey and got more food. The movement has been either a threat or an opportunity, so it has been worth paying attention to it.

Applied to modern times, it can also be stated that a moving image arouses stronger reactions in the brain and stimulates more brain areas. Movement conveys emotions and dynamics, which makes it attention-grabbing and interesting. According to research, a moving image is 400% more attractive than a still image.

 

Get’em while they’re hot, the timing of marketing matters

Advertising is most effective when a person can immediately act in the desired way after seeing or hearing the advertisement. For example, entering the store. From the TV commercial seen the night before, it’s quite a long time and journey to the store checkout. This problem does not exist in an online store, but in the case of a physical store, the further the advertising message is from the actual purchase, the greater the chance that the matter will be forgotten.

The people swarming the corridors of the shopping center are the perfect target group for store advertising. They have already chosen to come to a place whose sole purpose is to sell products and services, and they are actually looking for something that interests them. Then the most favorable time to reach a potential customer is when they are near the store. If they can still be presented with more advertising content, the probability that one of them will make a passer-by stop being a passer-by increases considerably. Here, the digital A-board clearly outperforms the single, stationary advertising poster of the traditional A-stand.

But that advertising poster says…

If you think about it quickly, one of the strengths of a simple poster stand could be that it can be easily and quickly updated. Remove the old poster and replace it with a new one. However, it is not that simple. The need for updating must first be identified. An old ad is easily forgotten to proclaim an already outdated message, and someone still has to go and change it as well.

The digital version of this also lives up to its name, as the advertising screen management system can be used to schedule advertisements to be shown far into the future. The material is always up-to-date and for surprising situations there are easy, almost automatic tools for producing brand-new, high-quality content. In addition to being up-to-date, the staff saves time for actual sales work.

Advertising stand or a digital A-board?

The result of the comparison may seem quite overwhelming in favor of the digital A-board, but in the name of honesty it must be stated that a traditional advertising stand is a good solution in certain situations. If the A frame sign is outdoors exposed to the weather or it is a single store with a limited product selection, purchasing a digital signage system is a bit of an exaggeration. On the other hand, if there are, for example, three or more stores, the digital A-board results in both considerable savings and visible sales growth below the line.